


The Rival

by storiesfortravellers



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Jealousy, M/M, Mild Kink, Moral Ambiguity, Multi, Possessiveness, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protectiveness, Secrets, Threesome - F/M/M, Violence, extreme measures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-08
Updated: 2015-02-08
Packaged: 2018-03-11 03:15:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3311855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/storiesfortravellers/pseuds/storiesfortravellers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Diggle loves Lyla and Oliver. But Amanda Waller holds a giant, morally gray place in their lives that he can't touch.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Rival

**Author's Note:**

> For trope bingo.

It’s not jealousy.

It’s really not.

It’s protectiveness. 

It’s knowing that when you love someone, you fight for them, even when they don’t know they should be fighting for themselves.

It’s not jealousy. Not exactly. 

It just feels like it sometimes.

—

There was a time when Lyla would fight him tooth and nail if she thought he were making the wrong choice. Even in a war zone, even with the bullets flying, she believed it was always possible to do the right thing. Or the least wrong thing, which was usually close enough that you could live with it, mostly. It was infuriating, sure, but it was also a comfort. If you even came close to edging off the moral compass, Lyla Michaels sure as hell wasn’t going to say nothing. Back then.

And back then he would do the same for her. They were on the same page, at least.

Sometimes Diggle wonders what would have happened if he had been a better husband when they came home. If maybe Lyla wouldn’t have joined ARGUS. He knows that’s silly, he knows that she’s like him; she has to serve, she has to fight, or she’s lost. But he wishes she could have found some other way. 

A way that didn’t involve Amanda Waller. 

Not that another ARGUS director would be any better. You didn’t get to that position without being, well, just like Waller.

And it’s not that he loves Lyla any less, now that she’s more comfortable with … compromise. He loves her, and he loves little Sara, and he loves the life they have. But there was a time when they talked about everything, when there was an unspoken line, and if either saw the other about to go over, they’d drag them back.

Now, he’s a vigilante and she’s an ARGUS agent. Strange that he’s the one that still tries to keep away from the edge.

—

When it started with Oliver, it was perfectly clear. It was just relieving tension, it was just the post-mission adrenaline that needed to be worked off. 

Except that it was also reaching a cautious hand to wake Oliver from a nightmare, from his sweat-drenched screams. It was sitting with him in silence, refusing to leave, as Oliver relived his island hell in those minutes after waking. It was knowing what it was like to feel like you’ve done something wrong by surviving, but never making either of you say the words.

He could see that Oliver was lost. He could see that Oliver had spent the last 5 years just plain not having the luxury of thinking about things like mercy or morality. He could also see that Oliver was trying desperately to do the right thing for the city, and he could see the weight of it, pressing down on his scarred body, the body that still tensed whenever he walked into a room with too many windows and doors.

He felt protective of Oliver as his bodyguard. But somehow, when he found out Oliver didn’t need a bodyguard, he felt even more protective. He felt like it was his job to push back when Oliver headed too deep into dark and lonely - when he was so focused on avenging wrongs that he forgot his family, his friends, and himself - when he got too far into his own head to remember the kind of man he was. It was never about judging. He was guarding the parts of Oliver that Oliver didn’t even realize needed protecting.

When he tried again with Lyla, it wasn’t more than a couple of weeks before she asked him if he was sleeping with Oliver.  
 “Not since you and I started up again,” he replied honestly.

She paused, then told him, “It would be okay. I wouldn’t mind. But just him.”

He was surprised, but only for a second. She looked at him, and he remembered all the ways she could always read him like a book. She knew he thought of it as his job to take care of Oliver, and she knew that Oliver was no threat to their relationship, and that he had no desire to be. 

When he told Oliver about it, Oliver didn’t understand. He kept insisting that he would never ask for that, that he wanted Diggle and Lyla to be happy, that he was fine and didn’t need a thing.

Finally, Diggle explained: “Lyla thinks we’re good for each other. She thinks both of us need… something, I guess.”

Oliver paused, then said, “So your wife thinks you’re intolerable without me to keep you occupied?”

“Shut up,” Diggle said, then kissed him.

It worked well, Diggle living with Lyla but still being with Oliver. Lyla even got Oliver to come over for dinner once in a while. She had a way of making Oliver relax a little, laugh a little, that was rare and genuine, and Diggle was grateful for it.

When Sara died, Lyla decided that Oliver was acting like a man about to fall. She talked it over with John, and they asked him to start spending the night.

The first time it was the three of them, it was awkward, complicated, but somehow gorgeous, perfect. Lyla watched him kiss Oliver, rough, possessive, and then she leaned over to kiss Oliver too. Diggle watched as she bit on Oliver’s lower lip, hard, as he moaned and grabbed at the sheets with his fingers. It was, without a doubt, one of the best things that Diggle had ever seen.

And after: Diggle savored the after, that first time and every other time. Lying in bed, Lyla and Oliver on either side of him, sleeping, curled up close. Oliver’s stubble gently rubbing against his chest as he slept, Lyla’s breath warm and steady on his shoulder. He felt it then, that protectiveness, that sense that however strong and dangerous they were, they needed him, that it was his job to have their back, to keep them safe. To keep them from being beaten down by the world, by the hardness of it, to make sure pain and guilt never pulled them down into a darkness he couldn’t save them from. 

He would do anything to take care of them. He didn’t give half a damn if it were patronizing. What he felt, it was more than protectiveness, it was overwhelming, it was mad desperation. Lying there with both of them in his arms, both their heartbeats against his skin, he felt a desire, almost violent, to keep them there with him, to keep them safe and warm and content, as long as the world would let them.

—

After they take down Boomerang, he doesn’t bring up what Lyla did. Kill off her team to keep ARGUS’s secrets safe.   
 They’re getting married, and that means it’s not the time to judge.

She knows how he feels about it, of course. He’s aware that they were bad men, that they were surely killers, but they were her team, and after leading teams in battle it just felt all sorts of wrong to take out your own team, no matter how evil they were to become one of Waller’s assets to begin with. 

There’s pain, to know that about Lyla, to see her matter-of-fact justification. Waller was busy, so Lyla, in that moment, had to be Waller. 

It’s pain but it’s not surprise.

It’s also no surprise that Oliver has no problem with it whatsoever. Sometimes they have an easy understanding, the two of them, that goes beyond sharing a bed and the occasional dinner. It’s not something Diggle is a part of, and that’s okay. Mostly.

After they had gotten back together, the first time Lyla said something about extreme measure to fight extremists, Diggle had stared. It was a bizarre moment, to hear his ex-wife use the exact words that Oliver often did. And he knew, in that instant, that those must have been Amanda Waller’s words. 

Diggle hadn’t quite figured out at the time how Oliver had met Waller while on that island. But the more time he spent with Lyla, the more he realized that there were things about the way Oliver did things, the way he justified things, that had been shaped by her. He could see it in the way Lyla had changed since the last time they were together, in the way that she saw the world differently, with a harder gaze, as if humanity were a weakness you just couldn’t let out at the wrong time. 

It was strange, to realize that both of his relationships were shaped by a woman he barely knew. The one that tried to blow up his whole city, the one that had convinced two of the best people Diggle knew, the people most stubbornly committed to doing the right thing, that it was foolish to hold yourself to a higher moral standard than your enemies.

 

—

There are times when he sees the way Waller looks at Lyla. It’s almost like a hunger, but because he’s heard what Waller is like, he assumes it’s that Waller wants complete loyalty, that she sees, rightly, great potential in Lyla. This is Waller’s specialty: find talent and develop it. Mold it so that it fits her way of thinking.

He hears about the pregnancy, about his own child, from Waller’s lips first. Lyla didn’t realize that Waller knew, of course. Diggle wonders about it, about how Waller knows Lyla’s body so well that she would be able to tell just by looking, when Diggle couldn’t.

He knows he’s being paranoid. But sometimes when you work with someone, when you feel like there’s only one person in the world you can trust and you’re stuck with them night and day, things happen. He wants to ask Lyla if she’s ever been in a relationship with Amanda Waller.   
 He never does. He’s not sure why: if he’s afraid of the answer or if he knows he’s asking the wrong questions.

He never asks Oliver, either. About whether he’s ever slept with Waller, about why Waller brought him to Hong Kong, about what Waller made him do. He doesn’t ask if he had sex with Slade Wilson, he doesn’t ask how many people Oliver killed before returning to Starling City, he doesn’t ask about anything. Oliver has already told him: “for five years, nothing good happened.” It’s all the answer Oliver will give, and Diggle knows that.

There are times when one of them says something harsh, cruel-sounding, and Diggle wonders if they are repeating something Waller told them once. There are also times when one of them comes up with a brilliant strategy that saves lives, and he wonders if they would have without Waller’s training. The woman was a genius, a murderer, a villain with a garden full of heroes. She was a leader who could make followers, true believers, even (especially) out of people who hated her. 

He looks for signs of Waller’s influence everywhere, in small words or thoughts, searching for ways that her fingerprints have been left, like bruises, on the minds of those he loves.

He thinks about whether Lyla or Oliver have ever been with Waller, if they have ever given her their bodies the way they do for Diggle, and it makes him angry, blind with jealousy, to imagine.

He knows he’s being ridiculous. He has no reason to think that has ever happened. And even if it had, who is he to care who they’ve slept with when they weren’t with him?

He knows, deep down, that this jealousy, this paranoid image of Waller stripping down his lovers, working them over like they belong to her, making them moan and quiver like they can’t possibly control themselves when faced with her temptations — he knows that he is being a fool. 

He knows that this unlikely possibility is not why he is jealous. 

He is jealous because they do belong to her — Lyla and Oliver both. He would give his life to stop either of them from losing themselves in violence and hardness and that ends-justify-the-means bullshit that shreds right at the soul. He would do anything to keep them from falling off the edge, but Amanda Waller thinks the edge is a fine place to be, and sometimes it feels like no matter what he does, her voice is louder than his.

At night, they lie in Diggle’s arms. They let him protect them as they sleep.

It feels real, feels like the truth deep in his bones.

But in the end, it’s just a game, an escape from the real world. Because when it’s time to fight, to become the deadly weapons that they all three are, it’s with Amanda Waller’s playbook. 

Amanda Waller has their hearts in a completely different way than Diggle does. It’s a way that Diggle doesn’t know how to fight.

He hasn’t given up. He still holds them tight.

He just doesn’t know if it’s going to be enough.


End file.
